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Toward 21st-Century Media: Critical Spatial Practices in Art History

Choi, Jung Eun 1

1Duke Univ.

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of a variety of critical spatial practices and theoretical frameworks in art history that help us understand more fully the potential of 21st-century media. Since the passing of the 1980s and 1990s when the intertwined themes of occularcentrism and immaterialism were central to new media studies, there has been a dramatic return to materialism and digital embodiment which I see as a moment of the reevaluation of the human body and its relation to technology. With the later emergence of ubiquitous computing that is seamlessly integrated into our environment, the focus given to the human body has been further extended to the technological milieu that grounds bodily implication. Media no longer serve to record, store, and transmit past experiences but instead operate as platforms for instantaneous action-facilitating interconnection with and feedback from the environment. These operations of 21st-century media were anticipated in a range of late 20th-century artistic practices in which the body underwent a certain level of exteriorization through technological mediation. This paper explores the artistic practices that experimented with the shifting relationships between the human body, technology, and space, playing with diverse possibilities of the interrelations and making their dimensions sensible. In so doing, it attends to major contemporary philosophical and aesthetic challenges by reframing the body as the locus of subjectivity that is always implicated in, thus interdependent upon, broader technological environments.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.